The Best way to stay connected
Once again, Steve Jobs has managed to dazzle the audiences with the new Apple iPad. When you look at the iPad, it may seem very familiar to you. That's because it's almost like an enlarged iPod Touch. Now iPad is actually meant to fit in a category between smartphones and laptops and to some extent it does fit, although iPhone has the upper hand (camera, video recording and other things). But iPad is meant specifically to surf the web and it does it's job quite well. Now, coming to the specs :-
Design and Hardware
Now, the design as you see it is very simplistic, or let's say very Apple-ish. You can see that the back is a bit bulged, which is a good thing because you can lift it easily if you place it on a table or any other flat surface. It's only 0.5 inch thick and weighs in at 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg) for the Wi-fi model and 1.6 pounds (0.73 kg) for Wi-fi +3G model. On the top, there's an On/Off, Sleep/wake button and a microphone. At the right, there's the screen rotation lock (which is useful if you're watching movies), and the volume rocker. At the bottom is the 30-pin connector and the speakers.
Coming to the display, it has a 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology and has a resolution of 1024-by-768 at 132 pixels per inch (ppi). Although it would've been great if Apple had incorporated the Retina display to the iPad, but that's not a major concern. The display is just great! . There is a bit of reflection, but it's okay.
Under the hood, there lies a 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip and the RAM is supposedly 256 MB. Now the RAM isn't
quite enough for multi-tasking which comes with iOS 4, but we'll have to see later.
There's the usual accelerometer and the ambient light sensor as well.
Coming to the battery, it supports 10 hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi, listening to music OR watching video, and upto 9 hours on 3G. It's pretty good! There's also a TV-out options as well. Ofcourse you have to get a dock connector to VGA adapter for that. But anyways it's good to know that it supports.
Browsing
Web surfing on the iPad is remarkable. You cannot expect any better experience than that on the iPad. Flipping through webpages on the 9.7 inch screen is just amazing. If you've used the iPhone or iPod touch, then this isn't anything different than that (except the screen and the keyboard). BUT, the browser has it's limitations too. It still doesn't support Flash !!, which means you can't play videos on youtube.com in your iPad web browser, and don't even expect Steve Jobs to "fix" that. He really wants HTML5 to be pushed forward, which is a very nice initiative, but it's still a long way ahead. So, other than Flash, there seems to be no problem with the browser.
Mail
There are practically no complaints about the Mail. It's pretty straight-forward. Just go to Mail App, open a mail and voila !. Pretty simple. And when you turn your iPad sideways, you get a split screen view of your mail and the inbox. You can easily compose a new e-mail just by a tap with your finger, and with the large QWERTY keyboard, it's even easier. As usual, you can add multimedia content to your mail.
Photos
There's also Photos (who didn't expect that) ;-) . Unlike iPhone, iPad makes use of the big screen to arrange the photos into separate stacks or albums, and it's really attractive. You can "quick look" the photos by two finger pinch dragging the album. Plus, if you have a Mac, you also get two options at the top i.e., Faces and Places. You can get all the pictures of a specific person, or you can get the photos taken from a specific trip. But it only works with iPhoto (on the Mac) :-(
Videos
The large high-resolution screen makes iPad PERFECT for watching HD movies and TV shows, podcasts and more. You can instantly buy a HD movie in the iTunes store. You can browse through your movies by the poster art in grid view. All the videos will be played in landscape mode and it's just a double tap away for widescreen view and full-screen view. What more, you can sync the movies with iTunes on your PC or Mac.
Music
You can get your music collection thanks to the iPod app. You can browse through the music through album, song, artist, genre or playlist. But no cover flow. Yes, there's no cover flow browsing in the iPad, as in the iPhone. But still i doubt that anyone would use it to browse. The Now playing screen is quite good, displaying the large cover art, and it's a tap away for the on-screen controls. And there's the usual iTunes store for you to buy music.
iBooks
The iPad makes a great e-book reader. There's a dedicated app called iBooks, in which you can browse through your e-books collection and read them. The collection is stacked in a neat bookshelf-like design, which displays all of your books by their front covers. You just tap to open them, and it opens up the page where you left off. Switching through pages is just a tap at the far right of the screen, OR you can swipe your finger from the bottom left to the bottom right for a more 'interactive' page turn. Eitherways, there's a neat animation of a real-page turn. While reading, you can turn the iPad sideways, for both the pages to be displayed, so get an experience of reading a real book. You can also add notes, bookmarks on the page itself. There's also a iBook store in which you can buy books. Oh, it also supports PDFs now. So you get Books and your PDF's in the iBooks store.
Others
Ok, other than all of those mentioned above, there's also the App store where you can download apps specifically made for the iPad as well as the apps for the iPhone. As for the iPhone apps, you get a small display of it in the iPad when you run it (for obvious reasons). You can enlarge it to fit your screen, by taping the button which appears at the bottom right of the screen.
There's also the Notes app, Maps app, Calendar app and finally the contacts app which are pretty self-explanatory. You can check the pictures below of how it looks.
